General Help and Questions

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Hi All,

Received a message from Booking.com today encouraging turning on Security Settings for Messaging including only allowing certain emails for contact guests and blocking links in messages with guests.  I was wondering if anyone else received this and what your approach is going to be or if there is guidance for how we should set this up to ensure that links to rental agreements, our websites etc still work and that messages still get to the guests.

The settings are found under Property | Messaging Preferences | Security Settings.

Thanks

the company that can be trusted to guide people through it all is going to become a dominant player.

Well, that's the trick for sure.  If you examine our ratings and evaluations as I do, there's a clear pattern - OwnerRez is known as having the best quality support in the industry, but certainly not the fastest.  What we are working to do is to increase the speed without compromising the quality, which is why we can't "just hire" people - we need to carefully select the very best, and then train thoroughly.

Those who have been with OwnerRez for any length of time can testify that the support team has grown enormously over the past few years, and this will continue as we seek to provide the very best possible service.  I can assure you that OwnerRez leadership does not view support as an expense in the sense you mean - we know full well that improving the areas where it's needed while not compromising what we do well, is absolutely essential to our continued success.

Thanks for your response.  It sounds like from other responses that timely communication is an issue. This may need to be prioritized over further development until it's running smoothly or you may begin to lose competitive advantage.

Thanks for the response. These are good tips!

The other way to do this is set a higher base price and then use discounts to achieve your pricing.  You can do this both on OwnerRez, or if you use a pricing engine like PriceLabs, you may be able to do it there.  Or you can use a combination (but be careful not to stack them unintentionally).

As an example, if you wanted to charge $250 a night except for one- and two-day stays, where you wanted the price to be $500, you could set a base rate of $500 and then set a 50% discount for stays of 3, 4, 5, or 6 nights, which would yield the result you want.  (After 6 days, you'd run into your weekly discount....)  Obviously, you could vary what discounts you want to to encourage or discourage particular lengths of stay. 

I wrote a similar complaint recently.  It's far from ideal, but I was encouraged to see that OwnerRez was hiring help-desk personnel.  

Personally I think they might be missing a trick because in an area as fast-moving, complex, and stuffed with cash as this industry is, the company that can be trusted to guide people through it all is going to become a dominant player. Companies generally need to stop looking at customer service as a cost, and more as ongoing customer retention marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing for future customers.

But I digress.  As OwnerRez deals with their scaling problems, I've found that the best way to get assistance with a pressing issue is to use these forums, and follow up with the help desk if it's an issue specific to my account.

If you do send a message into the help desk by email, you will get a response saying that they got it. If you *don't* get that response, maybe that's a clue that your message went to spam. I always look for the confirmation before settling in to wait for a few days.

As a side note, I also read the forums and contribute when I can help.  If everyone did this it would alleviate some pressure on the help desk staff.

That's a bit more difficult, but it can be done using CSS.  Here's more information:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/hosted-website-css-magic#hosted-site-hero-unit-font-color 

Thank you for this.  I was able to get the text in, but I would like to edit the font, size, and position on the page.  The place that the words land on the photo is not ideal for reading if that makes sense...  Any tips on changing just the font type and size of the banner text on top of the hero unit photo?  Thanks!

This support doc may be helpful:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/home-page 

Is there a link to step by step instructions for setting up text on top of the Hero Unit photo on website?  Also how to change the text font...   Thanks!  

Weird but thanks for digging that up. 

Thank you so much for your help!

There is no normal situation where you should go weeks with no reply at all to a ticket.

But, looking at your account, I do see that happened to you... your message was identified as spam, which is why nobody ever saw it.  :-/  I've fished it out of that bucket and sent it to the right place.  Sorry for the delay!

As far as a portal to see your ticket history, that is a possibility for the future, but we don't have any timeframe in particular.

Also having the same issue. I think I've sent in a couple tickets and it's been a few weeks with no reply. Getting a response that it's being worked on would be great or even a place to log in and see your open tickets would be beneficial.

Any plans for that Ken?

OwnerRez has limited support on the weekends, so, it is normal for tickets sent on Friday or late Thursday to be in queue until sometime Monday or Tuesday.

While we are looking into adding chat support, the real issue is a shortage of support representatives - which is why we are in the process of hiring more, though it will naturally take a bit to get them fully trained and up to speed.

Our immediate goal is to reliably respond to all ticket requests within 1 business day.  At the moment, we're hovering around that - it's achieved more often than not, but not consistently.  Once that goal is accomplished, we will work to further reduce response time.  But even more important is to maintain the quality of support - it's not acceptable to us to "just respond" without having a substantive, useful answer, which in turn requires experienced trained staff.

For having such a great platform, OR really fails in their customer support.  No chat feature and multi-day response time.  I sent a request a few days ago with an issue i was having and still haven't gotten a response.

Anyone else having these issues?  Any ideas on how to get a quicker response from OR?  It's hard to understand why so many companies have a chat feature but OR doesn't see that as a priority.

Currently when a new booking comes in i use the "notes"field to create a mini-checklist of everything i need to ask and badger the guest before check in.. A short list of like Did they fill in the security deposit? did they register with our HOA  community yet? Did they fill in the Docusign lease agreement? are they bringing pets? etc etc.... it is an extensive list. Is there a way to have a "check list" automatically generated per booking per property, that i can just click to check off as things arrive? Bonus Points, if this could be AI Driven through triggers to automatically remind (aka badger)  guests every 48 hours until they complete their tasks.  Either feature suggestion or ways to make this work as-is today?

I am already using tag automation, however we can not setup multiple triggers from that. I need a very simple ability to say "send this email every day at 9am until this tag/task is removed".  Right now your system will trigger ONCE on DAY1 and not RETRIGGER on days 2-99.

This should be working automatically, so, please write in to the Helpdesk with specific details, including the booking number, and screenshots from Airbnb showing the transaction history of the booking, as well as the refund, so we can investigate.

Last night the water went off at a property, in the middle of a cold windstorm.  The guest was cool about it.  The owner and I agreed to give him a partial refund, which I did, via Airbnb. 

OwnerRez isn't showing the refund, at least not in a way that I can find it. Do I need to enter this manually, and if so, how? 

Any help greatly appreciated.  I was unable to find anything in the help archives.

They said "the engineers were looking at it"

Please write in to the Helpdesk with specific details, booking numbers, and screenshots, so we can investigate.

I just noticed this today. I have a guest currently staying (booked via Airbnb) and my day-after check-in message didn't run. The message to be sent tomorrow with check-out instructions also shows as "Can't run yet." Both show the same error: "This booking does not have a Airbnb message thread.” The messages to this guest that were scheduled for yesterday and the day before were sent just fine.

It should not normally be necessary for anyone from Booking.com to talk to OwnerRez - in fact I don't recall even hearing of that request before.  They can always email us at the Helpdesk of course.

I took a look at your account, and as far as I can see it appears to be working correctly - the Booking.com API is configured and seems to be connected.  If you see anything that appears to be wrong, or have any issues with bookings, please write in to the Helpdesk with details and we'll get it sorted.

I have gone thru the process of adding Booking.com Our account is set up on Booking.com and the API connected. I just got off the phone with Booking.com and was told to finalize things they needed to talk to  Owner Rez. They tried to call but of course they weren't able to get thru to anyone. Is OR able to check my API connection and let me know if they see any issues or how do I deal with this. 

Yes, you can change this in the Hero Unit settings:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/home-page#hero

I've made that change to your test website.  While it does not fill the entire page, because it leaves room for the menu, it does fill the complete width - the height is limited by the dimensions of the image you are using, or in your case your video.

I've seen some of these ticket reports, and for at least certain situation, the message-thread warning is in error - we're looking into what's causing that.  The actual cuase in those cases is that the trigger criteria were not met at the time the trigger was scheduled to occur, so the message was not sent.

That's what I've been doing too, but it's excruciating because some randomly do get sent and some others don't and now I have to be figuring things out.

25+ triggers missed so far.

Thank You Ken!   I will see about doing the plug in.    I have one more question that maybe you could answer.

Question:   I am wondering if I am able to change the settings so that our website fills the full screen.    I have attached an example of the front page of our website on godaddy.com and then the website on ownerrez. 

thanks 

We are also seeing Airbnb triggers like check in and check out instructions not being sent. Direct and Vrbo work fine. The triggers in our messaging where the time has come and gone are showing a “Can’t run yet” and show a reason of “This booking does not have a Airbnb message thread.”. Sending the message manually does seem to work fine. 

Sure - in fact, if you have more than one property in your Hosted Website, it automatically does set up a separate page for each one.  I see yours has 6 properties, so, here are their individual pages:

https://www.mtvacationgetaways.com/flathead-lake-retreat-orp5b5eb30x

https://www.mtvacationgetaways.com/glacier-country-chalet-orp5b5eb2cx

https://www.mtvacationgetaways.com/glacier-gateway-home-mountain-oasis-orp5b5eb2fx

https://www.mtvacationgetaways.com/glacier-oasis-rv-site-2-orp5b5eb31x

https://www.mtvacationgetaways.com/glacier-oasis-rv-site-1-orp5b5eb2dx

https://www.mtvacationgetaways.com/waterfront-on-echo-lakegorgeous-viewsboat-ramp-orp5b5eb2ex